This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
Many optical communications employ single mode optical fibers to guide light signals between optical components. These fibers have a large but limited data transmission capacity. Systems using single mode fibers are nearing the capacity limit of such optical fibers. Therefore, optical fibers that allow transmission via multiple spatial modes are being investigated to increase the capacity of optical networks.